Key Takeaways
- Rongjiang County lifted itself out of extreme poverty only in November 2020, yet by 2024 its GDP reached 10.5 billion yuan, up 9.5 % year‑on‑year, driven largely by the Village Super League (Cun Chao).
- The league created the organisational backbone — Party‑led leading small groups, township new‑media centres, village stations and a county‑owned new‑media company — that later enabled the county’s AI push.
- Through the “Three New Rurals” slogan (phone as new farm tool, data as new farm input, livestreaming as new farm work) the county turned digital tools into productive forces for agriculture, tourism, culture and governance.
- A locally‑designed “1‑2‑3‑4‑5” target system aims, by 2027, to make Rongjiang a national benchmark for universal AI learning and application, with 300 home‑grown technical backbones training 30 000 application pacesetters across five benefit categories.
- AI is deployed on four fronts: lowering the cost of being seen (AI‑generated short videos for product promotion), easing grassroots cadre workloads (AI‑drafted reports and policy plain‑language translation), retaining local talent (youth returning to run AI‑enabled batik and embroidery businesses), and projecting local culture outward (AI‑animated heritage content linked to e‑commerce).
- Training follows a cascade model — core backbones teach township trainers, who then train village cadres and enterprises — paired with a five‑step closed loop (survey, backbone cultivation, universal training, scenario landing, review).
- By relying on cloud‑based AI services (e.g., Doubao, DeepSeek) and ordinary smartphones, the county avoids heavy hardware costs, embodying a form of digital sovereignty where the value created stays with villagers rather than flowing to a few northern tech firms.
The Road from Poverty to the Village Super League
Rongjiang, a mountainous county in south‑west Guizhou, was among the last in China to escape extreme poverty, only crossing the threshold on 23 November 2020. As late as 2022 its per‑capita output stood at roughly one‑third of the national average. An old upland saying described the terrain: “Eight parts mountain, one part water, one part field,” reflecting the scarcity of arable land and the difficulty of moving goods out of the valleys. Football arrived in the 1940s with Guangxi University students fleeing Japanese aggression, and villagers have organised matches nearly every year since. In May 2023 that tradition found a new expression in Cun Chao, the Village Super League — a competition organised, played and watched by villagers.
“Within weeks of its launch, the stadium’s stands were filled to the brim, and footage carried by the short‑video platforms drew the eyes of the whole country and then of the world.”
The league’s rapid popularity demanded an organisational capacity the county had never needed before: packing stadiums each weekend, maintaining security, and feeding a constant stream of broadcast content.
Building the Institutional and Material Conditions
The organisational structure that made Cun Chao possible was already in place. In October 2021 the county created a leading small group for new media and rural e‑commerce, jointly headed by the Party secretary and the governor. This body concentrated the efforts of agriculture, commerce, culture and tourism departments under a single Party‑led agenda. Beneath it sat a county‑level working team, a new‑media service centre in every township, a service station in every village, and a county‑owned new‑media company with private partners — forming a chain that linked Party leadership, grassroots mobilisation and market activity.
When Cun Chao launched in May 2023 a dedicated Cun Chao Office was added atop this structure to mobilise cadres, coordinate security and keep media channels flowing. The same mechanism later delivered thirty‑five thousand person‑times of new‑media training, built more than two thousand local livestream teams and over twelve thousand new‑media accounts.
Rongjiang calls its digital shift the “Three New Rurals”: the phone becomes the new farm tool, data the new farm input, and livestreaming the new farm work. As Party secretary Xu Bo explained, the aim is to turn Cun Chao into “new quality productive forces for local industry.” The county recognised that technology alone does not raise productivity; the relations of production must first change to accommodate it.
The material foundations for this transformation were laid nationally through the poverty‑alleviation campaign, which by the end of 2020 had paved roads, supplied reliable electricity, extended fibre broadband and 4G to >98 % of poor villages, and connected every poverty county to e‑commerce. Only after these basics existed could digital transformation become a realistic rural development strategy. Rongjiang later applied the same paired‑assistance logic used since 1979 — pairing coastal provinces with inland counties — to AI training, linking those with greater digital capacity to those with less experience.
From League to AI: The “1‑2‑3‑4‑5” Target System
Building on the organisational backbone, the county set its sights on artificial intelligence. Rather than constructing its own models or data centres, Rongjiang focused on building its people’s ability to use AI. The local mobilisation plan is expressed in a mnemonic called the “1‑2‑3‑4‑5” target system:
- One benchmark – By the end of 2027, become a national benchmark county for universal AI learning and application.
- Two pillars of support – Cultivate 300 home‑grown technical backbones and 30 000 “application pacesetters” across at least five concrete AI scenarios; each backbone trains ten, each ten trains a hundred until the 30 000 are reached.
- Three full coverages – 100 % training of government offices, 100 % basic‑AI‑literacy in every administrative village, and 100 % scenario‑application coverage across all sectors.
- Four‑tier linkage – A network running from county → township → village → enterprise.
- Five categories of benefit – Measurable gains in government‑service efficiency, tourist satisfaction, quality‑education coverage, medical‑diagnosis accuracy, and enterprise‑cost reduction, summed up by the slogan: “every village has an AI hand; every trade has an AI exemplar; every task has an AI enablement.”
AI on Four Fronts of Rural Revitalisation
1. AI Lowers the Cost of Being Seen
Before AI and new media, villagers could only sell produce by carrying it down to the nearest town. Professional posters or videos were unaffordable. The county trained residents in AI‑based content production, using mainstream tools and simple prompts.
“With little more than a smartphone, villagers can now generate and refine the promotional material themselves – a poster, a short video, an animation – and distribute it on the same platforms that carried the league.”
AI editing and large‑scale distribution were integrated into the new‑media system operated by trained villagers, allowing a match filmed on Saturday to be captioned, edited and uploaded to Douyin (China’s TikTok) within half an hour. Promotional videos now embed links to local products, turning the league’s visibility into direct sales and commissions.
2. AI Eases the Grassroots Cadre’s Burden
Grassroots cadres previously spent hours drafting reports, compiling tables and publicising policy. AI now drafts reports, assembles meeting records and recasts policy registers into plain language that villagers can understand.
“A cadre who once spent half a day on a draft now finishes in half an hour, left to localise and refine rather than to assemble from scratch.”
In Zhongcheng Town, AI‑assisted forecasting helped resolve sixteen disputes before they escalated in the first two‑and‑a‑half months of 2025, and cadres saved roughly two working days each. The county audit office also runs its own learning routine on inexpensive domestic models.
3. AI Turns Local Talent Into a Reason to Return
The programme seeks to reverse the outflow of youth by making AI mastery an attractive, remunerative occupation. Liu Qinlan, a kindergarten teacher earning just over 2 000 yuan a month, quit her city job when Cun Chao went viral in May 2023. After training, she began livestreaming local produce and later opened a batik studio that employs more than 180 embroiderers and dyers, generating over 2 million yuan in sales in 2025.
“Known online as Cun Chao’s ‘Miao sister Lan Lan’, she now runs a batik studio by the Cun Chao ground… giving more than 180 embroiderers and dyers work without leaving their villages.”
Such success stories encourage other young people, women and traders to stay or return, turning AI skills into a source of pride and income.
4. AI Carries Local Culture Out of the Mountains
Cun Chao teams are named after what they grow or do — Monk Fruit, Passionfruit, Bayberry, Homestay, Rafting, Rice‑Noodle, even “the commoners.” Winners receive local produce rather than cash, reinforcing a culture‑linked economy. More than eighty per cent of Rongjiang’s residents belong to the Miao, Dong, Shui and Yao ethnic minorities, custodians of heritage such as the Grand Song of the Dong, indigo dyeing and drum‑tower architecture.
AI animation, short video and digital‑human generation are used to project this culture — produce, trade and heritage — out of the mountains into national circulation and commercial cultural‑tourism branding. At the provincial level a Cun Chao digital‑human and smart‑companion platform offers AI tour‑companion services tied to the league and the Grand Song of the Dong, while enterprise training uses the Cun Chao brand, special crops and heritage as teaching cases.
Tailored Mass Training: The Cascade Model
Rongjiang’s training philosophy is “teach each person only what their own work requires.” Learners are sorted into groups — cadres (governance), merchants (income), youth and heritage‑keepers (cultural creation) — each with a bespoke syllabus. The county avoids one‑size‑fits‑all instruction, focusing instead on practical skills such as AI document drafting, AI short‑video production and AI visual creation; algorithms and model internals are left aside unless directly relevant.
Learning is treated as a rhythm: every Friday evening a trainer livestreams a class, drawing anywhere from one to three hundred viewers. The county insists that even a single viewer counts as “one person helped, one more person empowered.”
The paired‑assistance approach pairs those who learned first with those still learning — young cadres with middle‑aged and senior staff — to close the digital gap. In Zhongcheng Town, twelve technology‑promotion officers established forty‑two mentoring pairs, and a single round of centralised training covered ninety‑eight cadres. At Bakai Town more than sixty cadres trained on four working scenarios (smart document handling, population‑data modelling, new‑media outreach, emergency‑response dispatch), with those trained tasked to teach the rest so village cadres could run the systems independently.
The training follows a five‑step closed loop that can be deployed in any village or unit:
- Survey and preparation – inventory of industry, governance pain points, population structure and digital baseline to craft a bespoke plan.
- Cultivation of the backbone – train the core group of 300 technical backbones first.
- Universal training by the layered method – backbones cascade training downward until the wider population is reached.
- Scenario landing – each lesson is attached to a real task, preventing abstract learning.
- Review and quality‑raising – assess what worked, adjust the next loop accordingly.
The Long March of the AI Era
Observers in the Global South often view generative AI with apprehension — fearing dependence on a few northern firms, rising carbon costs, and labour displacement. Rongjiang’s response begins with cost: the heavy computation resides in the cloud, paid for by firms such as Doubao and DeepSeek and by state‑provided infrastructure; villagers need only an ordinary smartphone and the ability to prompt the model.
“The computation does not run on the user’s device. The heavy capital sits in the cloud… what the villager needs is only an ordinary smartphone and the knowledge of how to speak to the model.”
Because the base AI model has become a commodifiable service, no single vendor holds monopoly power; users can switch tools if one fails, keeping costs competitive.
When the county first introduced new media, many handsets were too old to run the apps. Rather than waiting for universal equipment, it started with the willing minority, let them earn income from livestreaming, and used their success to draw in others who then upgraded their phones. This income‑driven adoption created a virtuous circle.
What ultimately travels from Rongjiang is not the hardware but the method: a way of organising people around new forces of production. The institutional vehicle already exists — the Party‑led leading small group, the township‑village‑enterprise chain — and has been showcased internationally. On 10 November 2025 the county partnered with East China Normal University to open the South School in Toutang village, a platform for sharing poverty‑alleviation and rural‑revitalisation experiences. The school debuted alongside the 2025 Global South Academic Forum in Shanghai, where a panel on digital sovereignty and AI attracted groups such as Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST).
Rongjiang illustrates a different layer of the global struggle for digital sovereignty: while building its own chips or data centres remains out of reach for most poor counties, it can secure the power of its people to use AI on their own terms and retain the value they create. As the article concludes, echoing Mao’s description of the Long March as a “seeding‑machine,” Rongjiang is undertaking its own long march — one for the AI era — carried by organised villagers, drawing out their creativity, sowing new capability, and letting the gains flow back to the many rather than the few. The technology will keep evolving, but the core insight remains: for a place that cannot build the stack itself, the decisive question is who among its people has made the model their own.
https://thetricontinental.org/artificial-intelligence-in-the-hands-of-the-people-the-rongjiang-experiment/